Saturday, April 10, 2010

THE CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION OF A DEVICE FOR TRAVELLING IN SPACE

The rendering of space is a time old lashing together of assorted species, soft and melting. Its construction is simple. No voice is needed. Carry out construction in total darkness. Space is thick and often has a handle. It can be eaten.

Its height is relative to the length twice the equal distance from aft to mid-bow. Tangent, yet seemingly arbitrary, angles comprise the prow of polished porcelain. The length is relative again to these tangent distances, adjacent to height over width in the proportions of the Golden Mean.

Now heat it quickly before the hole closes. Quietly erect the oddest assortment to the tune of width over the proportionate volume squared. In cross-section, the hull comes apart in sixteen definite sections, commencing with the drunken gentleman at the rear who serves as a tiller.

The preceding sections have a pronounced lisp, which makes their speech soft and waxy. The wax, however, is edible. When moving the craft will make a loving sound, something like a nightmare.This will serve seven and is rainbow coloured. The length is variable. Stoke it. Finalize your preparatory analysis with checkerboard patterns. A handle and windows are optional. If it is squeezed, no deflection will occur in the surface if all parts are doused and steamed in malleable pearl.

To launch this device, have your hash browned at 170 degrees F. This will cause swelling of the joints and other enlargements. It is windy and there is a blue sky with puffy white clouds. On all sides can be seen shiny spheres of various sizes and colours. Fields stretch away to the horizon and back again. Once aboard the craft, the controls are nowhere to be seen. Sit back at a considerable angle.On arriving at denseness #1, we discover semi-distraught species of many earthly hues. They are salty and are ground up into small sections, right, centre, left and up. Denseness #2, area of perfumed atmosphere, comes along on armadillo back, with a siren. The armadillo may rent itself asunder behind your very eyes. Nevertheless, the next and last denseness is cerebral honey. It covers everything outside the craft. This density, by the way, may be calculated with your finger nail, or similar measuring device. The mean division is upper, while the axis swings on a definite line toward the South Pole. No deflection is possible, however, if you are prepared with either ether or some other ethereal substance. Mixing it may prove difficult at some altitudes. The swinging motion may be adjusted by a small lever on the right.At any moment, a small man, usually about 2 to 6 inches high, with a bowler hat and sixteen pairs of alligator shoes may land on your knee. Ignore this as you must concentrate on your instruments and charts. Straight ahead is affixed nothing less than a facsimile penguin-shaped duster. Dust everything. Polish and spit on it. Cover your mistakes with a black swan made of aluminum heated to its latent squid-diameter. If anything squeaks, abandon ship. There is no room for error here. Remove it and replace with sawdust, rouge, or a fine layer of mercury. This too must be polished if maximum equilibrium is to be maintained.

Now the provisions are loaded and we are on our way, alone in an ever expanding radius. Soon after departure we corner a number of small black hornets, six or seven to be precise. They seem perfectly adept at black-jack and other sports, but fail to be any use as food. With these, however, and little else, we set off for the nearest point.

At first things went well and morale was high. Some of the men played black-jack with the pseudo-food, and the rest meanwhile, lay stacked one upon the other in the corner. The negotiations and perturbations we were making were up to me to correct.

Some of the hornets could speak a little French and soon had engaged several of the crew members in discussions on neige-noir in the upper reaches. Black snow falls from the ground to the skies at certain periods when the moon is eclipsed from a certain angle around 80 degrees from the sun’s acute tangent running off to somewhere near my old barn. (It is sooty and smells of oats.)

The time was drawing nigh once again for this phenomenon to begin, but luckily, just as one of the hornets began an oratorio, we literally bumped into the strangest thing I have ever seen. It was large and rather bulky, with horns and several pods which I later found out were atrophied. Grey in colour and smelling rather musty, it made large leaps in the direction of just about everything and produced black smoke which it belched forth, interspersing with drops of pure gold, from several mummified segments. As if to mock us, each segment had its own hammer which it used to beat time with on a nearby wooden platform, as it danced about in a terrible and unwholesome jig.

The men were stupefied. Here, not five feet from our home, we had run across this denizen from the netherworlds. At first we mistook him from afar for the three foot extension eyebrows we has ordered. But no; these sanguine and aimless trolly babies were nowhere to be seen. Only this uninvited witness, who after several more astonishing leaps, finally sauntered off to the nearest archway and flashed away.

It was dawn. The sun was glowing, but not in its usual way. It was more as if it was split up like sections of an orange; each part hovered around the other and made an annoying buzz.

Finally, near the end of the voyage, we chanced to see a lonely figure coming across the dunes. As he drew near enough to be visible to us, we could perceive that he had only one leg, a body like a turnip and on top a single quivering blue eye.

I asked this nomad who he was and whence he came. He answered, “God”.

Gregg Simpson is a visual artist and musician now living on Bowen Island, British Columbia. This piece was written in 1968 when Gregg was still a a young man. Some of Gregg's lifelong work as an artist and local art historian can be found at the website listed below in his name.